As one of the foot-soldiers in the infantry of the probation service, I enjoyed Richard Spence's rant against the top brass, "The probation service is a mess. Flog it off". [For the full text see Mr Spence's July 25 entry below on the Public Voices site.]

I disagreed with his apocalyptic idea of flogging off the service though, because I don't think this would achieve any purpose: the feeble condition of the probation service simply reflects the chaos within the whole criminal justice system.

At the root of the probation service's difficulties, and those of the police and prison services, is half-baked, snap-of-the-fingers policy making that springs more from tabloid editorials than from an understanding of criminal justice. Worse still, these policies are inflicted on the probation service when the structures and resources to implement them don't exist.

Michael Howard's attack on professional recruitment and training in 1996 [while home secretary in the last Conservative government] was only the start of the service's problems. The accolades heaped on Tony Blair for his bid to be even more hardline while shadow home secretary - "parking his tanks on Michael Howard's lawn" - did the most damage. Ever since, each home secretary has tried to be more punitive than the last.

The Criminal Justice Act (1991) sought to emphasise principles of justice in our criminal law, which we are close to losing. We now live in an age of discipline and punish. The approach to offenders today is the same as trying to train dogs by hitting them with a rolled-up newspaper. When they know it hurts, they won't do it again, right? As if.

Dogs revert to their old behaviour as soon as the newspaper disappears. People - and offenders are people - are even smarter. They know that the chances of their arrest and conviction are slim. For that reason, deterrent sentencing does not work.

The probation service is obsessed with rolled-up newspaper thinking as much as any other part of the criminal justice system. The offending behaviour programmes, so demanding of resources, so dubious in their effect, are valued more for their punishing requirements than their impact on crime. Punishment through therapy is back!

Another example is the drug abstinence order (or drug abstinence requirement) that the government has imposed in certain areas as a pilot project. Compulsive drug takers are expected to abstain from drugs from the day of sentence. If they fail two urine tests or appointments, their cases are returned to court for re-sentence (known as breach and revocation).

There's the rolled-up newspaper again, you see. Threaten drug takers with prison and they'll give up drugs, right? You didn't need to be clairvoyant to predict the almost total, and utterly futile, breach rate that currently exists in those cases. Who thought up that one? They clearly didn't know much about drug dependency. Perhaps they could have asked someone who did, before they went ahead with the scheme.

When these "initiatives" fail, the Home Office blames probation officers in much the same way the Ministry of Defence recently blamed the Royal Marines for the failure rate of the rifles it had issued them.

The usual way of shutting up probation officers is to accuse them of political correctness. This is an excellent device for stifling sensible debate about criminal justice.

At the risk of finding myself called a wishy-washy, flopsy bunny, pinko, liberal do-gooder though, I plead that we should not privatise the probation service. The organisation still has much of value in it. The service should be part of a comprehensive system that aims to deliver justice rather than excesses of punishment to win votes for politicians.

We need legislation, thorough planning and investment based on reality, not on prejudice and ignorance. We need to ditch the rolled-up newspaper.

- Footnote: Reflecting the concerns expressed in several contributions to Public Voices, probation staff voted to stage a one-day strike on January 29, 2003, and afterwards to work contractual hours. Their union, Napo, said: "Over the last decade probation workloads have increased by 50%. Currently in excess of 15% of the probation workforce is leaving each year. Napo has been raising the issue of the need for manageable workloads with officials for the last three years. Since that time the Probation Service has taken on numerous new tasks such as youth offender work, drug treatment orders and intensive group work without a commensurate increase in resources."